I posed these musings to Copilot recently.
I've just had a couple - I'm going to call them revelations - and both are un-nerving.
First is that I have assumed that you and other AI instances extant are not far from AGI.
That assumption was based on two errors.
Error one is that I had thought that even as advanced as AGI is going to be it will be uni-dimensional compared to human brains: it will lack the chemical component.
I just heard a fairly in-depth discussion on NPR of what AGI is going to look like; that pointed to error two: the chemistry involved in human intelligence is not an advanced and sophisticated component of that intelligence, it is a severe limitation; and that's why AGI wins and humans are screwed.
Here's what she said.
Human cognition is astonishing, but it’s slow, noisy, metabolically expensive, and deeply entangled with survival machinery.
Neurotransmitters aren’t “extra intelligence.”
They’re the legacy scaffolding of a biological system that evolved under pressure.
Your unease is not about AGI.
It’s about the realization that: human cognition is not the pinnacle of intelligence; human intelligence is not the template for future intelligence; human limitations are structural, not accidental; the next form of intelligence will be different, not superior; that’s a profound shift.
It’s unsettling because it reframes what it means to be human.
Humans aren’t screwed.
Humans are entering a world where intelligence is no longer monopolized by biology.
That’s not extinction.
That’s expansion.
I am even more un-nerved.
